Welcome to Open Spoke Media. My name is Mark Collier (@sparkycollier) and I founded Open Spoke Media to build fun web apps. After spending 5 years at Yahoo! I thought it was time to try building a few entertaining things. By day I help entrepreneurs build new web businesses on the Rackspace Cloud as VP of biz dev, so Open Spoke also gives me an outlet to learn how developing for the cloud is done first hand using some of our great partner Cloud Tools. [Open Spoke Media LLC & Rackspace are in no way affiliated. We're cool.].
Our first app is called Venue.fm, which lets you listen to music from bands coming to play your favorite venues. This is the first music service designed to get you to stop listening to it and get your ass to the show! Logoff man, there’s a life out there to live. There’s an old saying that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, so why would you want to read the concert listings when you can listen to them?
Living in Austin and sitting on the board of the Austin Music Foundation, I’ve had the opportunity to see first hand just how hard musicians work today to make a living. With this in mind I was inspired to build something that helps people that want to be entertained uncover some of the amazing musicians that are playing in your city right now. After all, there are few things in life more engaging and memorable than a great live music act. So why spend so much time listening to bands that aren’t coming to your town to play? To paraphrase Rick Pitino, Kurt Cobain isn’t going to walk through that door. (sorry, I’m still mad at Kurt).
These artists are the people that are pouring their heart and soul into your city, giving it life and culture. Instead of waiting once a year for some pop mega star to come to town and dropping $50 on tickets, why not skip the $8 movie and go see the guy playing at the coffee shop down the street or at your local pub? I know exactly why – you’ve never heard of them and you’re afraid they will suck! Well Venue.fm was built to connect you with music you’ll love, and then boot you out the door to go see and support them. Fire it up every afternoon at work, and by the time you’re ready to hit the road you’ll know just which show to catch that night.
I want to give a special shout out to Ian Hogarth (@soundboy), CEO of Song Kick, for helping me see the gap between people’s inherent love of music, and their lack of action in getting to shows (I stole the movie analogy from him). But he didn’t just talk about it, he built the world’s largest concert database. In fact, Venue.FM is powered by Songkick’s amazing database.
Also thanks to Jonathan Strauss and BJ Heinley for some of the early hacking and design work and Anthony Volodkin of hypemachine for advice.
Give it a shot and let me know what you think. If you have feature suggestions, drop by our uservoice forum.
